Would anyone be interested in a survival-game style tree-cutting system? The included blueprints would spawn cuttable tree actors procedurally at runtime, which could be cut down based on a configurable number of hits, and yield a configurable number of pieces of wood, similar to what you’d see in The Forest or Don’t Starve. Tree chopping visuals would be powered by displacement modifiers, as seen in my tutorial series here:
A suite of different cuttable trees with included blueprint actors, meshes, materials, textures and particles would be included, as would an sample project containing sample actors that would allow the user to study the system and learn how to integrate it into their project.
Individual interactive tree actors would be swapped out with visually identical dummy placeholder instances to save on performance, but would swap in the interactive cuttable tree actors whenever the player is in a close proximity to the respective actor.
Would anyone be interested in something like this?
I actually had the idea to put this out as an asset after having made a rough proof of concept for a top-down game I’m working on currently. The proof of concept doesn’t have a ton of trees, though that’s something I wanna make possible, but it does showcase some rough tree-cutting stuff:
Oh definitely, I’m probably going to start working on it this weekend, I’ll be sure to get in touch with you as I get closer to completion. Shouldn’t take all that long to put it together.
Yeah i would be interested in how your setting this up for my game it looks interesting, I’m guessing your using a actor or are you changing the mesh out ? the main problem i found with trees is that foliage doesn’t rep so for networked games it becomes a problem.
I wouldn’t be using the foliage painter/procedural foliage tool in this case, I’d be dynamically spawning in actors, so theoretically they’d be able to replicate. I’ll have to look into multiplayer and add it to my to-do list.
For a large open world game that has 10,000s of trees making all these actors its to heavy, but thats fine i need to look into creating a C++ plugin so ISMC do rep then you can change out the foliage for a actor on the 1st hit rather than having a world full of tree actors .
Yep, that’d be a good way to do it, I actually have a friend who accomplished something similar, sadly I don’t know C++ so I am unable to replicate it. The closest I can get to it is having the actors swap themselves out with cheaper dummy actors whose only logic is to represent the visual of the tree by using a static mesh, and then to replace itself with a more logical, interactive actor when the player reaches a certain vicinity or hits the tree. I would of course need to run tests to see how this would perform, and I’ll likely do so this weekend.
Got a bit of a jump on it this evening, was able to spawn 10k instances over a 150KuuX150Kuu area at runtime, ended up with roughly the same frame rates as I’d get having painted them with the foliage painter at a similar density, around 70-90fps. Still a bit more to do; gotta make proper meshes and particle effects, stipulate where the chunks of tree come out based on hit location, allow for options like slope angle based spawning prohibition and toggleable randomized z rotation and scaling ranges, but all in all, the base spawning was way easier to put together than I had expected.
We’d be interested in this, if it were a complete end-to-end package (full degree simulation) including Mannequin animations, axe models, flying wood chips, sounds, and so forth.
Also, we wouldn’t want the tree sectioned into logs, just down on the ground. And the tree would have to smash the lumberjack flat if it fell on him.
So yeah, the stylized stuff I’m posting is just what I’ve developed for my personal project, but I’m gonna be porting over the scripts to their own solitary asset, and I’ll be including several different kinds of more realistic looking trees.
Swapping out the assets will be supported, as will spawning multiple types of trees in the same pass.
I dunno if I’ll add mannequin animations as I’m not versed in animation, but I’ll add a couple axe models.
Flying wood chip particles will be included, as will some sound clips.
For the tree falling, I’ll likely just keep the falling piece intact and let it fall on the ground for the asset, I just liked the splitting “poof” effect for my project.
I’d likely buy this seems really useful, curious about the estimated price for it? (had to ask I know someone will haha). Also your game looks pretty sweet, love the art style.
Thought I’d post this link incase its of any use to you, I’m guessing it isn’t as your already good with blueprints, but this guy uses the foliage painter and converts the trees to actors on first line trace
I know a lot of my customers would love it haha.
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